Mezzo soprano Kate Woolveridge has moved Alzheimer’s patients and prisoners to tears with her music. Now she’s been nominated for an Inspirational Woman of the Year Award. She spoke to Abbie Wightwick

Kate Woolveridge has been nominated for an Inspirational Woman of the Year Award

As a singer Kate Woolveridge has always been convinced music has the power to move and heal people.

Touring as a freelance mezzo soprano with Welsh National Opera for the last 18 years she also worked for a charity taking song into care homes for people with dementia.

Sometimes Kate would find herself singing with residents who, she had been warned, had lost the power of speech and memory.

“I would go in and sing Danny Boy to people with dementia in residential homes and they would remember the words.

“These are people who don’t speak any more. The staff would be in tears.

“It’s the power of music.

“It brought the person briefly back. I’ve seen that first hand,” she says.

After more than a decade working with The Lost Chord charity, Kate, 48, wanted to do more and 18 months ago set up a community singing project in Cardiff for people with Alzheimer’s disease and their carers.

The project, set up through WNO’s non-performance arm, MAX, with help from the Alzheimer’s Society, developed into the Forget-Me-Not Chorus, launched by Kate and WNO colleague Sarah Teagle in January this year.

The choir, which meets weekly at Rhiwbina’s Bethany Baptist Church, now has 40 members who have at last found something they can do together again, says Kate.

While many activities are closed to people with dementia, singing has the power to reach them and put them on an equal footing with carers again, even if only for that brief time, she explains.

Although no longer part of the WNO, the choir still gathers every Monday night with Kate’s 17-year-old daughter Ella providing coffee and tea, pianist Deb Cohen accompanying and Sarah Teagle managing.

“I believe passionately in the power of music as therapy,” says Kate, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music after a music degree at Sheffield University.

“We have someone coming who doesn’t recognise his partner any more but when they sing he’ll hold her hand.

“It equalises their relationship just for that brief moment.

“The choir is a safe environment for people to share.

“When you get dementia one of the first things that goes is confidence. In the choir they’re given a safe environment, encouraged to use their voices and not patronised.”

Kate’s work with the Forget-Me-Not Chorus, which has already done two concerts and is preparing for a third, has won her a nomination in ITV1’s Lorraine’s Inspirational Woman of the Year awards.

The singer has beaten scores of other nominations from around the UK to reach the final three.

The winner will be announced at a the Women of the Year lunch in London later this month but Kate says whatever happens, just being nominated has been a boost for the choir, which she hopes to expand.

On Monday she travels to London to be interviewed on air by Daybreak presenter Lorraine, but says she wants to share the honour of the nomination with the whole choir.

“Being nominated is amazing and slightly surreal and at first I was uncomfortable with it.

“The people who are inspiring are the people caring for someone with dementia, they are what gives me inspiration.

“I have always believed in the power of singing, I believe in it passionately.

“Using your own voice is totally liberating and I feel a joy using my voice as a positive effect on people.”

For Kate leading the Forget-Me-Not Chorus has combined her two loves, singing and using music, to change lives for the better.

“The idea for the choir came mainly because I had so many years of work with people with dementia.

“WNO has a big community choir I also help run and I had seen what singing can do.

“The interest I’ve had all through my career is how singing affects people and audiences and the capacity of music to take you to a different place.

“Then I heard of the charity Lost Chord 15 years ago and after an audition with them went into homes to sing; that’s what started my interest in dementia and music.

“I have no scientific knowledge and no personal experience of the disease.”

She may not be a scientist but many years of bringing singing to Alzheimer’s patients has convinced her that music touches parts of the brain and memory that other stimuli can’t reach.

“I can’t tell you about the neurological stuff but it’s a different pathway I’m sure.

“We have one chap in the choir who has not spoken for years and he sat up and sang My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.

“We were all in tears.

“Singing together in the choir is therapy.

“It calms people and changes the way they think.

“Research shows that while people with Alzheimer’s won’t (always) remember singing the feel-good factor they get from it and the emotion they feel stays with them afterwards, even if they don’t remember why.”

The case of choir members Alan and Ann Cummins is just one example of how singing together can change lives.

Alan is a full-time carer to Ann who developed early onset Alzheimer’s in her late 50s and for him the choir has offered a chance to do something together again.

Talking about the effect the Forget- Me-Not Chorus has had on their lives he explains: “It has opened up a whole new world and Ann loves the camaraderie. Everyone there has different problems through dementia but we’re united in music. It’s really inspiring.

“I’m very aware that for most of the week I’m a carer and Ann is the person I care for but when you’re involved in a joint project like this it feels you have regained an equal footing.”

This is one of the things Kate and Sarah hoped for most when they set up the choir and they’d now like to expand the idea by taking it into care homes.

“The model works and what we’d like to do now is take the idea into care homes so that people can come in and sing with loved ones,” she says.

The choir, though not expensive to run, is seeking funding and Kate hopes her nomination will encourage supporters as well as raise the profile of how much singing can help people with dementia, a growing issue in a rapidly ageing population.

While Kate doesn’t want the choir to become too big, or develop into a franchise, she’d like to help as many people as she can through singing.

“It’s a fantastic thing, singing in a choir and making a mass sound. This is about people coming together.

“It gives me an amazing buzz running the choir. It’s a real high for all of us.”

Kate wants the singing to be as good as possible: next page

Although coming together is vital, Kate stresses that the point of the Forget-Me-Not Chorus is also to make music and she wants the singing to be as good as possible, telling the singers when they aren’t doing well enough.

“We strive to be as excellent as we can. I don’t patronise people. I’ll tell them if it’s no good.”

No qualifications are needed to join the ensemble, except having dementia or caring for someone with it.

Current members, aged from people in their 50s to 80s, are divided equally between the sexes and age is no barrier.

The oldest member, a 93-year-old, died in the summer, and Kate explains that people are capable of singing very late in life.

Even if carers and medics believe some dementia patients have lost the power of sound, Kate’s own experience has shown this is not always the case.

Recently she was asked to perform in a care home at Cardiff Bay where she was moved to see she was singing for her former music teacher from Whitchurch High School.

“She did recognise me.

“It was lovely. It felt like I was giving something back,” she recalls.

And it’s not only older people who can be transformed by the power of singing, she points out.

As a professional singer Kate has been into some of Britain’s toughest prisons to run workshops.

She has also done singing projects with drug addicts in the Valleys and children on the Gurnos estate in Merthyr Tydfil.

“I went into Holloway Women’s Prison to do a singing workshop three years ago.

“The women were so pleased to be able to have a voice and sang amazingly.

“We sang jazz and blues.

“I also ran a workshop in Parc Prison in Bridgend; that was different, it was much more testosterone led but the men were really happy to make a noise.

“I taught them Men of Harlech which they really embraced although a lot of the inmates aren’t from Wales.

“I also sang opera to them and half of them cried.

“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

“I think there’s something about the beauty of music that affects people.”

In the Rhondda Kate helped drug addicts of all ages sing lyrics they’d written themselves about their lives.

“They wrote their own lyrics and put them to music with a composer and sang them.

“They felt their lives had been made into art and been given worth.

“Singing together helps people’s confidence.”

The community children’s project on the Gurnos was also aimed at helping people feel better about themselves through singing en masse, something Kate believes has a powerful physical as well as emotional effect.

All these community projects seem a long way from the glamorous stages she has performed on during her career.

As a singer with English National Opera, Swansea City Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and WNO, Kate has appeared on stage at Glyndebourne, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, at cathedrals, concert halls and theatres around Britain.

But singing, wherever it is performed, holds the same power and joy for her and others.

Kate left the gruelling life of touring after she married and had two children, and now tours and works as a freelance when she can and teaches singing at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Luckily singing in the chorus for WNO’s upcoming tour of Jephtha and La bohème only means being away from Tuesdays to Saturdays so she’s still free for choir rehearsals and to sit on Lorraine’s sofa on Monday.

Singing, Kate stresses, is something that should be available to all, especially people with problems like Alzheimer’s, whether they’re patients or carers.

“I feel passionately that singing is therapy.

“Everyone can sing.

“As human beings we’re noise machines.

“Choirs give people the tools to make a beautiful noise. We can all sing and it’s cheap, you don’t need an instrument and there’s no baggage.

“It’s like going into a room and screaming.

“It’s a release.”

Except, of course,Kate and her choir sound a lot better.

For full of the Forget-Me-Not-Chorus visit www.forgetmenotchorus.com

Lorraine is broadcast from 8.30am to 9.25am Mondays to Fridays, on ITV1 as part of Daybreak

The winner of ITV1’s Lorraine Inspirational Woman of the Year Award will be announced on October 22

I would go in and sing Danny Boy to people with dementia in residential homes and they would remember the words

WalesOnline is part of Media Wales, publisher of the Western Mail, South Wales Echo, Wales on Sunday and the seven Celtic weekly titles, offering you unique access to our audience across Wales online and in print.